An American War: How Operation Epic Fury Began, and What It Reveals
On the morning of February 27, 2026, Vice President JD Vance told the Washington Post that the United States preferred the diplomatic track with Iran. "It really depends," he said, "on what the Iranians do or say." The Iranians had not done or said anything. Twenty-four hours later, nearly 900 American and Israeli strikes hit Iran in the opening wave of Operation Epic Fury — the largest U.S. military action in the Middle East in a generation.
That gap — between Vance's statement and the bombs — is where this story begins.
The Deal That Was There
To understand what happened, you need to know what was on the table the week the war started.
Since early February, indirect talks between the United States and Iran had been proceeding through an Omani channel, mediated by Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi. The final round — held in Geneva, February 24–26, at the Omani ambassador's residence in Cologny — was attended by nuclear experts and Jonathan Powell, a senior British diplomat best known for brokering the Good Friday Agreement. By all accounts from those present, it produced something extraordinary: a framework that went further than the 2015 JCPOA, reportedly including "anytime, anywhere" inspections and a permanent cap on enrichment in exchange for phased sanctions relief. Trita Parsi, one of the most careful Iran analysts in Washington, described it on Charlie Rose as historically unprecedented. The parties had agreed to reconvene in Vienna on March 2 to finalize terms.
On February 27, Albusaidi flew to Washington and briefed Vance personally. That same day, he appeared on CBS Face the Nation and declared: "Peace is now within reach." Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed the talks had been "one of the best, most serious, and longest to date."
The following morning, while Iran was preparing for the Vienna meeting, the strikes began.
The Threat That No One Can Find
The administration's stated rationale was that Iran posed an imminent threat — that it was one to two weeks away from a usable nuclear weapon, and that the United States had no choice but to act immediately.
That claim has never been corroborated by a single institution inside or outside the U.S. government.
The Pentagon briefed Congressional staff in the days following the strikes and confirmed there was no sign Iran had been planning to attack the United States. The Intelligence Community — through its Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe — declined under oath to say that an imminent threat, in any legally meaningful sense, existed. Most strikingly, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — the senior official whose professional job description is to assess exactly this question — resigned, stating in a letter that has not been factually refuted: "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation."
What followed at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 18 was remarkable. When Senator Jon Ossoff pressed Gabbard directly — "Yes or no: was there an imminent nuclear threat posed by Iran?" — her answer was: "It is not a responsibility of the intelligence community to determine what is or is not an imminent threat."
Ossoff replied: "It is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States." He was right. That function — distinguishing a specific, credible, time-sensitive danger from a chronic condition of hostility — is not a peripheral duty of the IC. It is close to the central one. Gabbard's answer did not contradict Kent. It reclassified his professional finding as a question that was never the IC's to answer. Only the president, she said, makes that determination.
Ratcliffe offered a different evasion. He said he disagreed with Kent — but when he explained why, he cited 47 years of Iranian hostility and called it an "immediate threat at this time." He did not say "imminent." That distinction is not semantic. "Imminent" has a specific legal meaning in American war powers doctrine and international law: it requires specific evidence of capability and intent on a recognizable timeline. Forty-seven years of hostility is a chronic condition, not a threshold. Ratcliffe's formulation, if accepted, would license military action against Iran at any point in the last half century — and would mean the word "imminent" means nothing at all.
The UK, America's closest intelligence partner — whose diplomat had been present in Geneva — stated it saw no evidence of an imminent threat. France and Germany were caught off guard by the strikes entirely. If there were a "smoking gun" shared through the Five Eyes alliance or NATO channels, it would not have surprised London, Paris, and Berlin. It did.
When the Strike Was Actually Planned
The clearest explanation for why the war began when it did — rather than when the "imminent threat" timeline suggested — was published by the Wall Street Journal on February 28, the day the strikes began, and confirmed by Axios reporter Barak Ravid on March 1.
The operation had been planned since December 2025, jointly with Israel. The original strike date was February 21. It was delayed by bad weather. The February 28 date was chosen because Israeli intelligence had located a rare window: Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei and top officials would all be convened in one place at the same time, offering an opportunity to "decapitate" the leadership in a single wave.
One Israeli official, speaking to Axios on background, went further regarding the Geneva talks: they were intended, he said, "to let time pass until the new strike date — keeping the Iranians believing diplomacy was still Trump's primary path." The operational logic of the delay, in other words, was not to give diplomacy a chance. It was to keep Iranian leadership calm and stationary long enough to be struck. Two American officials pushed back on that characterization, saying the talks were genuine and that an acceptable offer might have prevented the strike. But the architecture — a December plan, a weather delay, a strike timed to a leadership convening — does not fit the "imminent threat" narrative. It fits a premeditated operation that used diplomacy as cover.
Vance told the Washington Post the morning before the strikes that diplomacy was preferred. Whether he was deceived about the timeline or simply excluded from the final decision loop, the consequences were visible: he disappeared from public life for approximately 48 hours after the strikes began, offered the bare minimum of formal endorsement on reappearing, and has not since attempted to rally public opinion for a war the president has said he was initially reluctant about. Trump himself acknowledged their "slightly different philosophy." The VP who briefed a peace envoy the day before the bombs fell has spent the weeks since saying as little as possible about a war he apparently did not know was coming.
What the Strait Revealed
Four weeks in, the strategic picture is complicated in ways the administration appears not to have anticipated.
Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow channel through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil passes. Shipping traffic dropped by more than 95 percent. Global oil prices surged past $120 per barrel. QatarEnergy declared force majeure on exports after Iranian strikes hit shared gas fields. Iran is now developing a selective "vetting system" for Strait transit, offering passage to India, China, Japan, and Iraq while excluding U.S. and allied shipping — turning a geographic chokepoint into a bilateral bargaining chip that advantages its remaining trading partners and isolates Washington.
The administration's military campaign has been extensive: U.S. Central Command reports striking more than 8,000 targets and destroying a substantial portion of Iran's air defense infrastructure. Israel launched a limited ground operation into southern Lebanon on March 17, displacing over a million people. Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed in the opening wave; his son Mojtaba was appointed his successor on March 8 and promptly demanded the closure of all U.S. bases in the Middle East.
The costs are spreading. American allies have declined to join a coalition to keep the Strait open. Trump has called them "cowards." The war that was described in its opening days as a time-limited strike to neutralize a nuclear program has since acquired goals that keep expanding: unconditional surrender, regime change, Trump personally selecting Iran's next leader. None of this was what Congress was told when it voted.
One Man, Uncontradicted
On March 5, the House voted 219 to 212 to reject a war powers resolution that would have required Trump to seek Congressional authorization to continue military operations. The Senate had blocked a similar measure the day before, with only Rand Paul crossing party lines to support it. The Republican caucus was nearly unanimous in voting to leave the president unconstrained.
The next day, Trump announced he was demanding Iran's "unconditional surrender" and that he would play a role in selecting the country's next leader. Having been handed a free hand on Thursday, he expanded the war's stated aims on Friday.
The sequence matters. Congress did not simply fail to constrain this war — it voted, by deliberate choice, to remove the mechanism by which it could have done so. Senators Collins and Murkowski described a bounded, limited conflict; they used their votes to ensure they had no way to enforce that description. They are now doubly exposed: constitutionally complicit in surrendering their oversight role, and politically exposed to constituents whose gas prices are rising because of a war whose expanding aims none of them formally endorsed. Trump then compounded the bind by threatening to veto all legislation reaching his desk unless Congress passes the SAVE Act — using the compliance he extracted on war powers as leverage on an entirely unrelated front.
Step back and count what has been subtracted. The Intelligence Community did not support the imminent threat claim — and its director declared, under oath, that establishing whether any such threat existed is not the IC's responsibility. The Pentagon said Iran had no plans to attack. The Vice President was either deceived or excluded, and has since said as little as possible. Jonathan Powell and the UK saw no imminent threat. France and Germany were surprised. Congress voted to give away its leverage and was rewarded with immediate escalation. The MAGA influencer ecosystem — Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly — publicly called the strikes "disgusting" and "evil" on America First grounds. Their audiences did not revolt. Base support for the war increased as its aims became more maximalist and more incoherent.
What remains, when you subtract all of that, is one man's determination — offered without intelligence support, without allied consensus, without VP buy-in, without Congressional authorization, and in the face of an active diplomatic breakthrough — as the sole operative input into a decision that has now killed thousands, closed a global waterway, and set a precedent for how the United States uses military force.
There are constraints remaining, but they are not political. Markets, fuel prices, and military logistics impose friction that requires no organized constituency to generate. The constraints that were supposed to come from democratic institutions — from the IC, from Congress, from the cabinet, from the vice president, from allied governments — were either bypassed, declared irrelevant, or voted away.
Trump did not seize power in the classical sense. The institutions designed to check him mostly chose not to. That is, in some ways, a more consequential fact than the war itself: the steering mechanisms were there. They were simply released.
No comments:
Post a Comment